Updated on
Summary
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has designed modern planes to operate safely in a more modernized air traffic management system. NASA asked the three largest airplane companies Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing in the US to come up with a design that would fit a very specific criteria. Each design looks very different, but all final designs have to meet NASA's goals for less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption. Each aircraft has to be able to do all of those things at the same time, which requires a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles, NASA said in a statement. Each design has to fly up to 85 percent of the speed of sound; cover a range of approximately 7,000 miles; and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds of payload, either passengers or cargo, it added.
